Recent reviews by fokehS

Currently incompatible with the Steam Deck; loads Indy's beard hair and eyelashes and a blue background. Very disappointing, hoping this addressed very soon.

On a Rail makes me want to lie down on a real rail track.

This is what Bungie should be doing with Marathon.

EDIT: I have refunded this game.

This is incredibly overpriced for what it is, especially if you purchased the Awesome Rivals Edition. It's sort of on par with the Hot Wheels Unleashed experience, with a few extra nice features but also some additional pitfalls.

This game does play a lot into the LEGO element, allowing you to smash apart scenery and even damage your own car (with parts flying off), but this is definitely a world apart from LEGO Racers 2, and not for the better. There appears to be a decent amount of content on offer, with different types of races and minigames, but none of this stuff to do actually feels enjoyable to complete. Everything is just busywork, none of it is gratifying.

This has to be the least enjoyable game I've played all year as far as mechanics, and a large part of that is the poor vehicle controls, where I feel like I'm constantly fighting with the car. Expect a really bad turning circle (bad at high speed, abysmal at low speed) and inconsistent braking/drifting controls depending on what you're doing in the world. I cannot put the car where I want to go, no matter what I try.

Car creator is okay. Despite the advertising for a wide variety of bricks, there feels like a lot of really important elements missing, and the inability to pick from more than ~7 chassis designs (none of which really suit the builds I wanted to go for) hurts a lot. Still, the system is more permissive than I expected, allowing you to build really tall, lengthy or wide vehicles, and there's a decent array of Technic components which actually work better than I had assumed they would. Using a controller for the builder is extremely awkward, and the KB/M experience isn't much better.

One of the silliest design decisions is that cars with more parts are considered "heavier" and therefore "slower" than those with less parts. That means that if you somehow build one of the real life Speed Champion sets (based off real life super/hyper/race cars), they will be less useful in almost all parts of the game than if you created something extremely basic, like one of the City sets.

The shop doesn't appear to be fully available in the preorder Early Access period (when I played this game), but I can confirm that there are microtransactions at outrageous prices. Already on offer are some LEGO City/Creator vehicles; I suspect LEGO will not be offering the full selection of Speed Champions sets going back since the series inception for licensing reasons. Maybe that's for the best, as 2K would just make them ridiculously overpriced anyway.

For performance, it seemingly runs better than most other Unreal 4 releases this year (only some shader stutter during the first few minutes on a 3-year old mid range rig with Ultra graphics on Ultrawide resolution, ~90FPS constant). On first run, the game launched windowed for some odd reason, and doesn't support Exclusive Fullscreen by default. 120FPS is the maximum framerate cap offered by the game. Lighting is very weird, many of the characters and shadows just look... odd? It's hard to describe unless you see it. The shaders definitely don't fit with the texture and model work. The skybox for the initial area is pretty ugly, with a low-res picture background of some clouds and 3D LEGO clouds in the foreground.

As you should expect, dialogue is extremely childish, expect to smash that Skip button a lot if you're over the age of 6.

I would hold out until this title goes for maybe a quarter of the price. There are some nice things here and there, but there's too many rough edges, the monetisation is extremely aggressive and it doesn't have a lot of staying power to make you want to stick around for more.

Fantastic single player experience, the games have aged like a fine wine with a little help from the wonderful folks at 343.

It takes the best bits of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Mass Effect, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords and Watch_Dogs and wraps them up in some of the best looking visuals out this year.

There's a few bugs, but nothing game-breaking yet. Performance on a Ryzen 5 3600X + RTX 2080 Super + 32GB RAM at Ultra/1080p feels good, with only some minor drops during the most intensive cinematic sequences.

Definitely worth the wait.

(Review for launch version 1.0.0.1)

This completely blows the original out of the water; you better believe I'm recommending this to all my friends. Fantastic work on display here.

There's a few things you should know (checkout out the developer-provided FAQ for more info):

Positives:

• The UI redesign is nearly flawless; it's beautiful and much easier to use than the original game.
  
• The new music tracks are fantastic. You'll know when you hear them.
  
• The intro has been totally rebuilt, and it merges the best bits of the old with the new.
  
• The updated timings and new animation work completely blow the original away, I was laughing more often compared to my first go at the original all those years back.
  
• Sam can now properly sprint, so larger scenes aren't as tedious to traverse.
  
• There's a few new anti-frustration features; in Episode 4, you automatically teleport to a certain character after completing a puzzle in a different area, and another room now has a screen that lets you instantly access the Desoto menu.
  
• The inventory menu uses the Season 3 design. It's now easier to "inspect" inventory items, to receive a hint about their purpose.
  
• Outside of the well known graphical and lighting changes, there's lots of little dynamic effects work you notice over time; for example, there's a load of TV screens in W.A.R.P. Studios that show the actual scene, not just a static low res photo.
  
• Each episode has unlockable chapters, so you can now replay an episode from a specific bit, instead of having to restart from the beginning if you forgot to make your own manual save.
  
• Achievements now exist on the PC version. They're nothing too challenging, but are fun to chase if you want an excuse to dig through some of the more esoteric parts of the game.
  
• Remote Play is flawless.
  
• Only a 1GB download (less than the soundtrack!), and includes all games in the single application.

Negatives:

• Bosco's new voice is unfortunately lacking ("low energy" is the best description I saw). If you're new to the franchise then it should be just fine, but it is definitely distracting for existing fans.
  
• They did not re-record Max's audio for the first episode with William Kasten (or an appropriate soundalike).
  
• Character portraits no longer appear next to subtitles.
  
• If you play with controller (I've test KB/M on my Desktop, and X360 Controller via Steam Link to my Raspberry Pi), instead of a pointer, you use the stick to cycle through all the interaction points. It takes a bit of getting used it and it's a little slower than pointer (that said, being able to highlight all interaction points is a nifty feature).
  
• The unlockable chapters I mentioned earlier don't include names or descriptions (at least from the top-level list), so it's hard to know which part of the episode you're jumping back to.
  
• One of the funniest things to me was in Episode 2, when recording the Cooking Without Looking show, Max's head barely peaked over the counter. The change in camera angle has broken that effect.

Bugs:

• There are some clips of the old Max voice on a few interactables in Episode 3 and 4 (the Desoto being the main one).
  
• The screens on the targeting computer in the War Room of Episode 4 don't update after you hit the fire button.

Misc:

• I encountered at least one tweak to an existing puzzle. If something seems out of place, try looking elsewhere.
  
• I haven't tested remote play on mobile yet; will update this review with results later.

Overburdened by microtransactions and abysmal levels of grinding, the Online portion of the game is also plagued by hackers, a completely wonky anti-cheat system and no attempt to put the player's fun first.

The singleplayer experience was decent, but was much enhanced by mods. Take-Two's decision to ban mods is likely because they know their own incompetence at dealing with hackers in the Online game (and this won't fix that) or because they plan on doing something ala Bethesda's Creation Club and so they wanted to bully the competition out of the way.

♥♥♥♥ 'em.

It took me 10 years to successfully complete a Terrorist Hunt (all the way from the original Xbox). The key? Dual shotguns.

Rewriting my review as I've now 100%'d the game (with 0 deaths).

I had been super psyched for this game. I'm a massive Jurassic Park fan, and having enjoyed Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis, Jurassic Park: Trespasser, Jurassic Park III: Danger Zone! and LEGO Jurassic World, I was ready to take on a more cinematic experience that would hopefully go deeper into the Island and its problems.

I was so terribly wrong to be excited.

This was a painful, brutal experience. From retconing the official canon and the classic messages of the books/movies, to poorly constructed gameplay and bad design choices, this abysmal experience is not for the faint of heart.

Jurassic Park: The Game is an example of game that does QTE-gameplay poorly. The reaction times are wildly inconsistent, and often you'll find that the game wildly changes between requiring light-speed reflexes and dinosaur-slow presses. The UI Prompts which tell you what to press do not line up with whatever is going on behind them, and often you'll be pressing directional keys that have no relevance to the action the character is performing, which means that it's almost impossible to guess what to press next and makes the game feel random and not skill-based. As well as this, the QTE-chains have no visual hints for the next button press in the queue, so in order to obtain the Gold rankings needed for 100% completion (or to just keep your character alive) you'll either need to keep practising by reloading your previous checking (simply press "Load Game" in the Pause Menu) or just get damn lucky with your guesses to get it flawless.

In one of the final QTE sequences of the game, you're required to mash a button beyond the limits of human strength and stamina; as it turns out (EVEN RUNNING ON A GTX 980!!!) the game lags so bad at this point that it isn't able to grab your input as often as is required, so it assumes you're mashing the button slower than you really are. You'll need to lower all your graphics settings to pass this stage for flawless achievement and the Gold ranking.

The problems in this game's technical execution are compounded by its inane ranking system which I've been making mentions to above; each stage of every episode is ranked between Bronze, Silver and Gold based on how well you do during a QTE sequence (if applicable, as some parts are dialogue/investigation only and should automatically grant gold). In some stages, you can get away with a few slip-ups, while others require every single QTE press to be perfect. Inconsistency is this game's major pitfall, and it makes playing the game frustrating as you have no way to know if what you're doing is going to absolutely work or not. The game makes sure to put the ranking directly in your face for the entirety of the sequence, and in some cases it will auto-save a checkpoint right as you fail a QTE, essentially screwing you over if you wish to obtain Gold on your first try.

With that in mind, it's recommended that you get Gold rank on every stage on your first go, as attempting to replay a specific stage from the main menu will not save checkpoints, meaning you'll need to restart the entire stage if you continually mess-up.

I've focused on the gameplay, but it's not the only place that has major issues. For a game relying on the strength of its storytelling and characterisation; many of the characters are 2D and unlikable, and will often do stupid things that go completely against their character, the dialogue was written by a three year old having a tantrum, the voice acting is often stiff and lifeless and the animations can end up looking like bad animatronics.

To spare myself further pain and misery from recalling my experiences, let me finish with this; Telltale Games have made fantastic games, such as the Sam & Max franchise, The Wolf Among Us and Tales from the Borderlands. Those games do everything this game tried to do MUCH better, and you'll enjoy them far more.

Only buy this game if you're a serious achievement-♥♥♥♥♥ who is also a glutton for punishment.